Merry Christmas! Your Salvation Army is closing!

[Jay2TheRescue]

That is one good thing about my local Goodwill.  The times I've seen stuff I was interested in on the donation pile they have always priced the items immediately for me.  I've bought several items that way, including several vintage pieces of furniture from the 50's.  Some of it I thought they were going to throw out assuming nobody would want it.  I understand the policy of not pricing stuff in front of the customer, I've seen people take the tags off items they thought were too high and try to get them repriced lower.  Personally my thoughts are this, if its priced too high let it sit there until it goes on 50% off sale, that way they understand they overpriced it.

-Jay

Thrift Stores can do alot of good for the community, however they should realize that the stores are a representation of their organization & should put a little more effort into hiring quality managers & having logical store policies.  I am getting really frustrated with the Salvation Army around the corner form where I live.  I saw a cute vintage aluminum cake holder in the donation pile yesterday.  I inquired about it & the sales person said that it may be going out to Springfield (trucks come every day & take stuff to the big distribution center there).  I told the manager that I was interested in it & would buy it.  He said he can not price stuff in front of the customer, but it would make it out to the floor probably by today.  Well I went back & found out it had gone down to Springfield!  It is the repsonsibility of the staff to pull out good stuff for the store.  They just let Springfield take all the stuff & then they send back whatever they don't want.  It makes no sense!  No wonder their kettle donations are down.

[valleythriftshopper]

I would just be happy if they would go through their own donations instead of letting Springfield take all the stuff, price it, & send back what they feel like. 

You can tell what stuff has been down there because they use printed tags, rather than handwritten ones.  What is even more annoying is that the local store often crosses out the price that Springfield puts on it & writes in a higher price!

Many people are complaining about that store now & the sales apparently are not too good.  Hopefully they can find a new manager or retrain that one.  In any case I am eagerly awaiting tag sale season, which won't start until around April

[Jay2TheRescue]

I would just be happy if they would go through their own donations instead of letting Springfield take all the stuff, price it, & send back what they feel like. 

You can tell what stuff has been down there because they use printed tags, rather than handwritten ones.  What is even more annoying is that the local store often crosses out the price that Springfield puts on it & writes in a higher price!

Many people are complaining about that store now & the sales apparently are not too good.  Hopefully they can find a new manager or retrain that one.  In any case I am eagerly awaiting tag sale season, which won't start until around April

I wonder, if they are repricing it anyway, why send everything to the distribution center?

-Jay

[valleythriftshopper]

I don't think they can be bothered going through it before the truck comes.  The truck comes every day & takes away whatever is there unless they pull it first.  At the other S.A. in the next town over they have locked donation boxes behind the store.  Many people drive up after store hours & drop stuff off.  The store employees, even the store manager, don't have the key to the boxes, so only the truck has access to the stuff.  That all goes down to Springfield too, which makes me think they are running some kind of racket down there, but who knows.  None of it makes sense, but it sucks for the local shoppers!

[dukek9]

valleythriftshopper, SA is the same way here. They ship a lot of the donations to the store here directly to the distribution center.  The reason given is that this is a small store, so not enough room but what burns me is how the really great stuff doesn't make it back here.  Those with limited transportation can get to the local SA, but not to Erie.

I'm not really sure if the local staff are supposed to pull out god stuff and just don't bother or what. But still you would think once in a while they could bring a truck back with some good stuff, instead of taking it all away.

I really know very little about the donation process there because I have been very turned off by their attitude there. They always acted like it was a big pain that you brought stuff in, like it was more garbage they had to deal with or something. I thought that was just my perspective but others have shared the same feeling.

And the thing that really turned me off doanting there was when my friend and I did a big purge of stuff in houses and took it there.
They had this huge mound of plastic garbage bags and boxes and chairs and whatever in donation room and kept telling us to just lob our stuff on top, despite the fact that we kept mentioning we had breakable things.

Then my friend carried in this big painting I had in a frame which I liked but hadn't had room to hang for a long time.  So instead of it languishing in basement and getting ruined or something, it seemed logical to me to let someone else have a chance with it.  And I figured even if they didn't like the paintin, the frame was nice.

So they tell my friend to lob it on the pile and she says, oh this needs to be stored upright--it's a real painting and will get ruined in the pile. Well the one guy tells her to stand it up by the wall which she does.  We go out to get some more stuff and the painting has been thrown on the pile and a woman is angrily berating my friend for putting the painting there and tossing the painting on the pile. My friend apologizes and says that this guy said she could put it there and the woman angrily screams that he is an unpaid volunteer and you do not listen to him.  Poor guy.

At this point, I was just in tears that this happy exeprience was goign so badly and feeling badly for my friend getting yelled at, for the volunteer guy who had tried to help and just everything.  I was ready to grab the painting back, like I said I did like it) but it was in center of this mound of stuff. And just then the workers were throwing more garbage bags and a box on the mound and there was a crash--evidentally someone had brought dishes in, and the  heavy box dented in the painting.

That was definitely my last time donating to that specific SA.  I have donated a small amount to another SA but gemerally my donations go to other thrifts. I mean these people ruined a lot of good merchandise, had attitudes about the whole thing, were mean to the volunteer, were rude to my friend and just awful.

Anyway, I agree that there needs to be better management and fairer distribution of the goods, as well as great customer service on the donation side.

Dee

[valleythriftshopper]

I go to both S.A. stores in my neighborhood almost everyday because they are close by & open til 7 pm most nights.  I have gotten to know the employees & the routines pretty well there.  The manager of the SA with the locked boxes is a really great lady.  She used to be the manager of the smaller one that stinks now.  They can take whatever they want out of the pile for their store.  She has great taste & used to pull out all the cool stuff & put fair prices on them.  I got stuff there all the time.

She moved to the bigger one because it is a much nicer cleaner building with more staff.  I don't blame her, but at that store she does not have access to all the donations, so it is still not as good as the other store was before.

I was telling her about my cake holder today & she said those people at that store don't know what to pull from the pile & she missed the donations there.

I think alot of people would tell me to get over it & get a life, but if you are a bargain vintage junkie you know what a bummer it is to have a really cool store go away.

They are pretty nice about taking donations, sorry you had such a bad experience!

[elementalcharmer]

I worked for a goodwil for A short time in rural Georgia and the policy was that no donations were kept at the store of origion.  The had to be sent to the processing center in Savanah. Why I dont know.

As for the closure of Salvation Army stores. It has been the topic of my friends and I. I now live in Belleville, IL (east of St. Louis) and I must say that Sal Arm has gotten to be quite pricey. I mean compared to the other thrift stores in the area they are asking almost 30-40 percent more. So they are pricing themselves out of business.

[valleythriftshopper]

I must say that Sal Arm has gotten to be quite pricey. I mean compared to the other thrift stores in the area they are asking almost 30-40 percent more. So they are pricing themselves out of business.

Agreed!  I was in the Boston area for New Year's & stopped at a suburban SA.  The prices were actually not too bad, which really annoyed me because the cost of living is much higher in the Boston area yet the Western MA (where I live) SA's are more expensive!

[Femme1]

Our Salvation Army in Bloomington, Indiana, is still one of the lowest priced thrifts in the area, so I hope they aren't upping their prices. Around here, it's the Goodwills that are super high-priced. The local SA is really sloppy, dirty, and I always feel like I have to take a shower after I shop there. BUT I have found cool stuff in there cheap.

[oceangurl]

I'll agree with the Salvation Army being sloppy and dirty, I went to one In Tampa, Fla, had to do an errand out of town and so my Mother, Father and I stopped in , they had these big bins in the stores with different prices on them where you would just basically dumpster dive, alot of stuff in their was dirty, stained and smelled, like it hadnt even been sorted, ewwh I hope that I wasnt going thru the sorting bin now that I come to think of it, lol!

[foutchie]

ElemCharm - small world!  I live an hour outside St. louis (missouri side) but was born and raised in Granite City IL!  I know Belleville!

[elementalcharmer]

yes it is a small world.

[Tammy]

valleythriftshopper, just wondered if you live in IL also?    I'm near Peoria and Springfield is where the main distribution center is.  I've also had items that weren't priced taken away to be sent to Springfield.  It's extremely annoying not to mention how much extra gas is it taking to put a sticker on an item that might end up being under $5. 

[valleythriftshopper]

I saw a cute vintage aluminum cake holder in the donation pile yesterday.  I inquired about it & the sales person said that it may be going out to Springfield (trucks come every day & take stuff to the big distribution center there).  I told the manager that I was interested in it & would buy it.  He said he can not price stuff in front of the customer, but it would make it out to the floor probably by today.  Well I went back & found out it had gone down to Springfield! 

Well I had to go back & find this post to quote myself.  Today at the Survival Center thrift I found the same cake pan that the SA manager screwed me out of for $1.50 which is less than I would have paid for it at the SA anyway.  It is a Westbend acorn aluminum cake pan/cover.  I am too lazy to take a pic of it, but there are a few on Ebay at any given time.  I am glad the Survival Center is getting better donations now because they are cheaper and more mellow than than the SA, although that particular manager is gone now (they rarely last longer than 6 months).